June 18, 2008

The theme of this week's session of Appearances was Ethics: specifically some of the ethical issues that arise when taking photographs of people in the street. Ethics is largely a matter of how we treat other people (and, to a certain extent, the kind of person that each of us chooses to become). The point of this session was to raise questions rather than to give a definitive answer to those questions.

Ethical issues arise in the act of taking a photograph of someone who doesn't want to be photographed. Although in many parts of the world it is legal to photograph someone in these circumstances, it clearly causes some people distress. In extreme cases, it can be tantamount to stalking someone (the paparazzi syndrome). A photographer might argue that no one is seriously harmed in the process and that if people are in a public place they are fair game (and even that there is tacit consent to be photographed by entering the public space of the street). In Street and Studio in Tate Modern the sequence of images in Room 2, taken on the street in Hong Kong by Ed van der Elsken seems to border on harassment if we are to believe the caption saying that the photographer just followed a 'babe' around for a bit photographing her even though she didn't want him to.

The subsequent use of an image is also important. If I walk down Oxford Street and someone tracks my progress on a surveillance camera, that is very different from a photographer takes my photograph (perhaps in an unflattering way) and puts my image in an exhibition or prints it in a magazine or newspaper. In Tate Modern, the Philip-Lorca diCorcia images from the 'Heads' (review) series taken using a telephoto lens in Times Square from 1999 - 2001 are of people who did not know what was happening. They had no idea that they had been photographed. Their images have then appeared in public places (including a book and now Tate Modern) and at least one of the subjects has tried (and failed) to mount a legal case about this use on grounds of privacy. diCorcia's defence was based on the First Amendment right to free expression (the case was dismissed on the grounds that there was too long a gap between the act of taking the photograph and the complaint : read a New York Times article about the case and another in the American Journalism Review).

In these two examples above, a Kantian approach to ethics might suggest that the photographer's actions were immoral. For Immanuel Kant, the Categorical Imperative, the basic rule of ethics is that you should treat people as ends in themselves, respect their autonomy, rather than treat them as means to an end. Ed van der Elsken treated the woman as a simple means to get a photograph rather than acknowledged her as someone with her own desires and wishes; diCorcia seems not to be unduly concerned with the individuals' feelings about how their images are to be used - for him his right to free expression as an artist/photographer is the issue.

A consequentialist might point out that any harm done in these cases is minimal (though in the Van E case, they experience of being pursued could be psychologically traumatic) and the benefit in terms of producing interesting street photographs, large. So cost/benefit analysis would suggest that the photographer was justified in his approach in each case.

Less straightforward is the example of Boris Mikhailov.[read an interesting piece from the Guardian about him, and also an interview with him] His photographs of people on the margins of Ukrainian society are disturbing documentary images. In some cases he has observed and photographed, and his actions are justified by the way in which he makes visible something that many people would rather not see. In this respect he is completely within the mainstream tradition of photojournalism. But at the point where he pays subjects to expose themselves for his camera he enters another domain. Here he is deliberately challenging our views about morality. These people are so destitute that very little sense of dignity is left to them, and Mikhailov demonstrates this by showing how readily they will further humiliate themselves for money. At first glance this appears a highly immoral act of exploitation of the vulnerable for the sake of a shocking image. A response to this view, though, is that there is a kind of 'tu quoque' move going on here, because in his commercial interaction and humiliation of his subjects he is simply mirroring economic relations that all of us are implicated in. He is perhaps saying 'You are no better than me'. Yet, even on this interpretation, it could be argued that as he has genuinely and knowingly further humiliated the downtrodden, he has done something seriously immoral to make a moral point, and that is not acceptable.

The neutral presentation of his highly challenging style of documentary photography in Tate Modern is unfortunate: most viewers need some background information about the circumstances in which these images were made to get a grip of what the moral issues might be here, and why they are actually an aspect of his approach to photography.

If you are interested in getting an overview of three distinct approaches to ethics, listen to these podcasts:

When I look at a photograph of someone I know, my mind is taken beyond the photograph to that actual person and what I know about them. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about this in his book called The Imaginary. In his example, he sees first of all a photo; then he sees it is a photo of a man on the some steps; then he appreciates it is a photo of his friend Pierre. At this point his mind is taken beyond the photograph. His thoughts are about the man he knows: Pierre.

In contrast, when I look at a photograph of a complete stranger, as is often the case with street photography, all I have to go on is the appearance of that stranger, and the minimal information contained in a caption if there is one. The rest is down to my imagination. Not that my imagination is completely free and unconstrained here, rather it is tied to what I can plausibly see within the image. This is a like the duck-rabbit case that Wittgenstein used to introduce his concept of seeing-as. I can choose to interpret the picture in a particular way, provided that the interpretation is consistent with the highly ambiguous information contained in the picture.

Whilst it is true that photographs carry factual information about their causes, this is rarely legible and highly open to manipulation by the photographer and other users of the image. Even with a straight photograph of a street scene, such as David Goldblatt's On Elof Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 1966-7, in Room 8 of the Street and Studio exhibition, the legible documentary information cannot be the source of our main interest in it since it is so minimal. We can recognize that there are children, adults, that some are black and some are white, and that they appear to be going somewhere, but little more. The caption tells us that we are in South Africa and the date that this is the era of apartheid. But even the facial expressions of those depicted may not be accurate about how they would have appeared over a period of a few seconds. The frozen instant can radically misinform us about what would have been easily legible had we witnessed the scene ourselves.

This is not to say that the photographs can never provide evidence about the past. A photo-finish image is fairly reliable evidence about which horse won the race. But that is in part because of knowledge about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken, but also because the information carried by the image is of a relatively simple and unambiguous type.

It is true that in ordinary life we frequently judge a person's character on the basis of a fleeting glimpse of their face. But in such cases we usually have a great deal of information about the context and location of what is going on. And it is rare for a fleeting glimpse to be as brief as 1/250 of the second. So we glean information about someone from changes taking place over time. With a single still image, particularly if it is in black and white, we have very little to go on. Consequently we use our imaginations to take us beyond the marks on the surface of the photographic paper. Street photography can be fascinating not principally because of what it shows us about reality so much as of a what it forces us to contribute as viewers of the images, what it suggests rather than demonstrates. This is not untethered fantasy about the lives of others, but rather a matter of filling in thoughts about what seems to be implied by the image, but yet might not be accurate about what was in front of the lens when the photograph was taken.

In other words, we are not simply passive interpreters of images whose meanings have been fixed by the moment of exposure, but rather active creators of their meanings to some extent. This differs considerably from our experience of images of, for example, famous people. When I look at a photograph of Mick Jagger, even though I've never seen him in the flesh, I recognized him instantly. My thoughts are taken far beyond the image to a man whose music I have heard, whom I have seen interviewed on television, and in Robert Frank's film. Although what I believe about Mick Jagger and his life may be misleading about the real man, I am not the one who is inventing the character that I believe to have been photographed. Whereas with a photograph of a complete stranger in the street I have to base my thoughts about who this person is and what they were doing and why almost entirely on non-specific quite general experience. The contrast is even more extreme if you think about a photograph of your child or lover. Here, although you see the photograph, I think Sartre is right when he suggests that we are typically transported in our thoughts to the person him or herself. In the language of philosophy, the phenomenology of looking at photographs of those we know, of those we recognize, and of those who are complete strangers to us, is very different.

April 04, 2008

Led by Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open University2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd June 20086.45 p.m. - 8.15 p.m. followed by drinks.

What is the self? Is this something that photographs can reveal? Or is photographic portraiture merely an art of appearances? To what extent does the alleged documentary nature of photography affect our understanding of what we see?

In this 4-session course, led by philosopher and writer Nigel Warburton, participants will explore philosophical ideas about photography and the self. Sessions will include discussion of thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. There will be opportunities for critical engagement with specific works as well as discussion of more general theoretical approaches.

Booking from early May on the Tate Modern website. These courses are usually oversubscribed, so book early if you want to come. The course will coincide with the Street and Studio exhibition.

March 22, 2008

Magnum photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the great war photographers of the Twentieth Century, has died (19th Feb. 2008). He is best known for his book Vietnam Inc., an angry protest against inhumanity, which epitomises the power of photojournalism to combine documentary recording with a subjective stance. You can watch and listen to an excellent Magnum in Motion podcast 'Vietnam' that shows and discusses some of this work. Watch this if you are unsure why he was such a great photographer and why his work was so valued.

His 1996 retrospective book was appropriately named Dark Odyssey. Stuart Franklin, the current president of Magnum wrote:

'It was Philip's consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work. Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle.'

Jones Griffiths' own words:

'My tools as a photographer are different to other reporters. I don't
have the time or space they have to go into context; my images speak
alone, which can be a problem. But all journalists share two concerns:
first, for truth; second, for the suffering of innocents. No man can
see what I've seen and not be moved to tell others about it.'

January 27, 2008

A huge cache of Robert Capa's negatives from the Spanish Civil War have just been found. Read about this here: 'The Capa Cache'

I wrote about the famous Falling Soldier image (allegedly of a Republican solider at the very instant of his death) in an article in History of Photography 'Varieties of Photographic Representation' (1991) vol. 15 (203-210) based on information from the Robert Whelan biography (you can read an article by Whelan on the topic here. Perhaps the question of whether Capa staged that image is about to be answered definitively...

October 08, 2007

Stuart Franklin, President of Magnum Photos, has just published a book of photographs taken in and around hotels in Africa. He agreed to be interviewed about Hotel Afrique for Art and Allusion.

Nigel : Why did you focus on hotels for this project?

Stuart: I wanted there to be a tension between the inside of the hotel - often plush, and set out according to international standards - with the locally specific exterior. Sometimes these tensions collide, as in the photograph of the English-style armchairs in a tent in the Serengeti. Here the landscape is seen through the mosquito netting. Sometimes the exteriors is seen through the wall of the hotel, as in Zanzibar where people cavorting on the beach are frozen in the circular patterns of the hotel fence.

Nigel: What special qualities do they have that reveal important aspects of Africa?

Stuart: Well the interiors mostly depict a hybrid space between global design and local culture, so that there are African woodcarvings or paintings set amongst international hotel culture.

Nigel: What would you say to someone who thought you were aestheticizing elements of Africa, focussing on surface visual juxtapositions rather than the more sinister aspects of corruption, violence and crime?

Stuart: I'd say they were right, although I hope that the scent of corruption is evident in some of the photographs, especially from Niger.

Nigel: Could you pick out one of your favourite images, describe it, and say what you were trying to do with the photograph.

Stuart: I have two favourite photographs - the man putting on a tie for the first time to go to work in a hotel in Accra, and the photograph, shot through a window, of men by a pool and cars
streaming down a highway in Abidjan. I'll talk about this picture. For me it works on two levels.
Hotels engage with a form of persuasive representation that will always seek to hide any faults (in the hotel itself or environment) and play up anything positive even if not quite true. Here I am reminded of hotel ads that claim to have stunning views beside the beach and omit the 6 lane highway just outside. The same with swimming pools: they should never look over a motorway. On another level the image shows these white (I am guessing) business visitors in the pool. The space they enjoy is small and discrete, almost like birds in tree above the regular ebb and flow of human activity. Here I sought to make clear this separation between the people in the picture and the rest of Africa - a distance they themselves seek..

Nigel: Africa is very diverse...

Stuart: Yes!

Nigel: What is your next project? A book to be called 'Footprint' on the changing landscape of Europe in the face of climate change. [Some of the images from this project are available from www.stuartfranklin.com]